


Minute Variations

by Veldeia



Category: Continuum (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Head Injury, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-21
Updated: 2014-09-21
Packaged: 2018-03-31 04:22:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3964210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Veldeia/pseuds/Veldeia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How the trajectory of one bullet could have changed the course of history. (Or, four takes on how different the consequences of Alec's time jump at the end of season 2 could have been.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 2.0"

Emily was dead.

Alec was so angry at the Freelancers, so angry at Escher, so angry at Kiera - so angry at the entire world - that he wanted to scream.

When he marched to Escher's office, he was half thinking that he should have a gun so he could just shoot the scheming asshole - and then he found out that Escher was his father. He really had no idea how to feel about that.

When Kiera had arrived, Escher said, "There's something you need to see. You too, agent Cameron. I think you will find it quite enlightening."

Escher took them deep into Piron's research lab, through numerous locked doors, into a cold storage room.

"Normally, we use this to store the sensitive biological materials needed in our research," he said, but the room looked more like a morgue. In the middle of it, there was a body on a table, covered with a surgical sheet. Alec was starting to worry about the kind of research Piron might be conducting if they needed corpses for it.

Escher did not give him any time to prepare, no warning whatsoever. He lifted the cover, and Alec saw that the corpse was - himself. Alec Sadler. Dead as a doornail, with a bullet hole in his left temple. Aside from that and the unnatural color of his skin, he looked as if he might be just asleep.

Alec felt like someone had pulled the rug from beneath his feet. He wanted to lean on something, but nothing in the room seemed sturdy enough.

"What's going on here?" Kiera asked, sounding wary. "Who is he? Who killed him?" 

"You know very well who he is," Escher answered, looking from dead Alec to live Alec. "And I didn't kill him, if that's what you're thinking. I would never do that to my son."

Kiera's eyes went wide at that, and she also glanced at Alec. He just nodded.

Escher went on, "Unfortunately, I don't know for sure who did, either. I had an autopsy performed on him, but the bullet didn't give us any clues. As for what happened, I think this will clear things up a little."

He walked to a corner of the room where a laptop rested on a table. "This is the surveillance camera feed from our antimatter laboratory."

The video showed the other Alec appear in the middle of the futuristic-looking lab in a flash of bright light, to the shock of two lab-coated researchers. Then, he just keeled over, dead.

"He came through using a certain spherical time travel device," Escher explained.

"But we - " Alec stammered.

"You have it, yes, I know, and of course you do, otherwise you wouldn't have been able to use it. Now, this footage is from a week ago. Both his belongings and what data we could glean concerning his time jump suggest that he came from today."

"Today? I die today?" Alec repeated, feeling at a loss for words. That wasn't something that happened to him often. Kiera was looking at him with something in her eyes that looked suspiciously like tears.

"No, Alec," Escher said. Then, he took hold of Alec's shoulders and looked deep into his eyes, a gesture more fatherly than anything he had done so far. "In one timeline, you died, but it's not inevitable. Actually, it's highly unlikely. Your arrival caused significant damage to our antimatter lab, and that hasn't been repaired yet, so you wouldn't be able to use it if you wanted to. Still," he said, his voice turning softer, "I want you to promise me that you won't try anything like this. You're young and the chance to put things right is very, very tempting. Trust me, I know that better than you'd believe. But you've now seen that it won't work."

"Okay, I promise," Alec said.

"I know I haven't been there for you, Alec, but that will change now. We'll do great things together. Don't ruin this by doing something rash," Escher added. As if Alec hadn't been convinced enough just by the sight of his own dead body.

  


* * *

  


In another timeline, Kiera was witnessing the world fall apart at the seams.

"What can we do?" she asked Catherine.

"There's nothing we can do, Kiera, but it's all right," the Freelancer leader answered. She made to take hold of Kiera's hand, but Kiera pulled it away. They may have caught her, but their pity was the last thing she wanted.

"Alec Sadler is gone from this timeline," Catherine continued, unfazed. "But whatever he tried to do, it did not work. The new timeline has assumed its correct course. Everything will work out as it should."

"The future will be as I remember? My Sam will be born?"

"Yes. It will be exactly as you remember."

Kiera did not dare to ask what that would mean for the other her. The Freelancers in the other timeline surely wouldn't want her to travel forwards in time to return to her family, and would probably try to prevent her from doing that if they could, but at least it was possible, in that other timeline, for that other Kiera.

For her, this was where it all ended, together with the rest of the world.

  


* * *

  


* * *

  


In the year 2077, Alec watched the crowd gathering to see the execution. Everything was in place, Liber8 had the pieces of the time travel device. Today was finally the day.

For the first time in years, he thought back to his dead other self from 2012, the one who had never lived to see his twentieth birthday. Alec was certain that he had jumped back in time to try and save Emily - he had been thinking about doing the same thing himself - but she had died anyway. He had been trying to change things, and he had failed. There was no telling how things would've changed had he been successful. With Emily alive, would he even have met his wife? Would Jason have been born? But he hadn't changed a thing.

Despite all the time he had spent on planning this little spectacle, Alec wasn't sure if he believed that he could change anything now, either. He had already witnessed everything that had happened in 2012 when Liber8 and Kiera and Jason had arrived in the past. This was where it had lead him: the very future that they had warned him about.

He had hoped he could avoid it. He had done his best. All he had ever wanted was to make people safe, healthy and prosperous. In a way, that was what he had achieved, but the cost had been too high. The world was not just safe, it was static, aseptic, poisonous to the human spirit, nearly devoid of free will.

Why would anything be different this time? Perhaps his plan was flawed from the beginning, nothing but a naïve fantasy, and they could only go back in time to do what had already been done.

Perhaps they were doomed to repeat the same events in an endless cycle, and nothing would ever truly change.


	2. 1.0"

Traveling in time was beyond weird. A flash of bluish light, a feeling of vertigo unlike anything Alec had ever experienced, moving at breakneck speed while staying perfectly still, like the world's craziest roller coaster ride on acid, like someone had just grabbed reality and crushed it into a tiny ball - 

The people around him had disappeared, replaced by two figures in lab coats, and Alec had just enough time to think "Oh shit, it worked, it really worked!" when the worst pain he had ever felt slammed into his head, as if his skull had been split in half.

Everything went black before he even hit the floor.

  


* * *

  


They were in the middle of trying to catch Lucas and dealing with the damage his elaborate hacking campaign had caused when Kiera got the phone call from Escher. She had no choice but to take a time out from everything else to handle the new, unexpected crisis.

"Alec, did you catch that?" she asked him through her CMR.

"I wasn't really listening so no, though I think I heard my name being mentioned. What's going on?"

"It was Escher, and apparently, you're in the hospital."

"Huh? No, I'm not, I'm right here!"

"Well, not you, as in you, but another you. A time traveler."

"As in older me from the future?"

"I don't know yet, he didn't go into the details, except that they found him in the Piron building and he's been shot. I'm on my way to the hospital right now."

Once Kiera had arrived and managed to get hold of a doctor who knew something, it quickly became obvious that the other Alec wasn't the old man from the future that Kiera had known, but around the same age as present-Alec, and he was badly injured. Kiera didn't get to see him, nor did she learn much more than that. The good thing was, apparently Escher hadn't told them Alec's name, and he hadn't had any ID on him.

"We're already working on figuring out his identity," she lied to the doctor. "I'll notify his next of kin when we find out who he is. What should I tell them?"

"You'll have to wait some time to have anything definitive to say. He'll be taken into surgery within the hour, and after that, it will be touch and go. Chances are that even if he survives, it'll be days or weeks before he wakes up."

Kiera did her best to keep her face composed and professional, although she felt far more shocked by the news than she had expected to. She didn't know what exact point in time he had come from, but it was still Alec they were talking about.

"Shit, that sounds nasty," Alec said in her ear. "Seems like other me will be stuck there for a while."

"All right, thank you," Kiera told the doctor. "Please let me know if there are any changes."

"We'll keep in touch, Agent Cameron."

"I've got an idea" Alec said as Kiera started walking back to her car. "He's going to be my twin. I can pull that off. I'll just need to duplicate a couple of records and change the name. That's a lot easier than creating Kiera Cameron of Section 6 out of thin air."

  


* * *

  


When Alec had started talking about time travel and people from the future, Emily had thought he was pulling some really weird elaborate prank. No matter how honest he had sounded when he'd sworn that it was all real, she'd had a hard time believing it.

The moment she saw him lying in that hospital bed, she knew without a doubt that Alec had been telling the truth.

Even identical twins would not be that identical: they were exactly the same, down to every line, pore and mole, every single detail that probably no one but her had even noticed. Indistinguishable, except for the fact that one of them was in a coma, with half his head wrapped in bandages and a tube pushing oxygen into his lungs.

"They say he's probably going to make it, but the recovery is going to take a long time, and there might be some long-lasting consequences," the healthy Alec told her.

Emily realized she was squeezing his hand so hard that it had to hurt. "Who did this to him?" she asked, almost whispering.

"No one knows for sure. Both Escher and Kiera have tried their best, but they don't have much to go on, since the shooter was someone in whatever timeline he came from. I don't think we'll ever know."

"Whoever it was, they should pay for what they've done."

She realized that having seen him there, barely alive, had made something snap in her head.

She knew she couldn't just let it go like the others had. They might be convinced that Escher had had nothing to do with the shooting at Piron, but she knew him better than they did. He'd used her and threatened her, he was ruthless, and he would stop at nothing to achieve his goals, whatever they were. She knew he was involved somehow. He had to be.

She wanted nothing more than to leave her past behind her. She was Emily now. She loved Alec, she truly did, otherwise seeing that other Alec in the hospital would not have felt so horrible. But there was one last task left for Maya Hartwell.

It took a lot of planning, but finally, everything was set. She had thought about all the details. No one would ever have to know it had been her.

She aimed, and pulled the trigger.

Problem solved. Escher had finally got what he deserved.

  


* * *

  


Alec sat down heavily on the diner bench. His head was buzzing - there was so much to take in that he didn't know how to handle it all. It sucked that the other Alec was still in a coma, he could have used a spare brain.

Escher was dead. Escher had been his dad. His mum and Escher's lawyer wanted him to inherit Piron. Jason was his son, from the future. Also, there were now two Kieras running around, one of them working with the Freelancers, from the same near-future that the comatose Alec had come from, and she didn't want this timeline's Kiera to know about her existence.

And then there was Emily, or rather, Maya, as Escher's files had revealed. He looked at her, sitting across from him, her face as lovely as ever. Had he ever really known her?

"I know the truth now, Emily. You were working for Escher all the time. Spying on me. Did you ever really even like me?"

"I did! And I still do," Emily said, sounding like she meant it. "Alec, it's not what you think. He did send me after you, but I had no choice. When I got to know you, I wanted to quit, but he wouldn't let me."

"He was blackmailing you?"

"He was, and I don't think I would've been completely free as long as he was alive."

"So you think it's a good thing he died?"

For a passing moment, there was the strangest look in Emily's eyes, and although it was gone in a heartbeat, Alec had caught it. He had thought he'd already been shocked by what he'd learned about her, but now he felt sick.

"You had something to do with his death, didn't you?"

She looked away, her lips pursed in a tight line. "I did it for you," she said softly. "For the other you in the hospital, and for us. I just wanted us all to be free. He was pulling all the strings, and that had to stop."

Alec stood up. He could barely breathe. "Emily, Escher was my father. Did you know that?"

Her mouth fell open. "What? No, he couldn't have been! No, I had no idea, you have to believe me!"

"I can't believe you'd do such a thing! Even if he hadn't turned out to be my dad, that's just - how could you? I guess I never did know you, not really. We're through Emily, or Maya, or whatever your name really is. I don't want to see you ever again."

He walked away, and that was it. They went their separate ways. He didn't tell anyone that it had been her - it wouldn't really have changed anything anyhow.

He never did see her again, and maybe that was for the best.

  


* * *

  


Alec woke up in the hospital, and he knew there was something very important that he had to do, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't remember what it was.

There were lots of things that he couldn't remember, such as how and why he had ended up in the hospital, or what had happened before he got here. They told him he'd been shot, but he had no recollection of that.

There were other things that were lost to him, too. He tried to hold a glass, and his hand shook so badly that he spilled most of the water. He tried to hold a pencil and write, but although he could speak the words well enough if he concentrated, he couldn't remember how to put them on paper.

One day, his brother came to visit him, except it wasn't his brother, it was another him. He said that they were pretending to be twins, and since they couldn't both have the same name, the out-of-hospital Alec would get to be called Alec and the hospital-Alec would have to be Alan instead, which he found confusing, although it did explain why the doctors and nurses kept calling him that.

Kiera also came to visit him, as did his mother, but they weren't quite right. It was the same as with the other Alec. They clearly were who they said they were, they were familiar enough, but still something was off.

His therapist told him that it was yet another symptom caused by the damage to his brain: Capgras delusion, a belief that the people around him had been replaced by lookalikes. He didn't think that was true, but he didn't have any other explanation, either.

One day, the real Kiera came to visit him. She appeared from thin air in his room, using her suit, and unlike that other Kiera, he felt like he really knew her. For some reason, she looked very sad.

"Alec," she said, calling him by his real name, although the others were always careful not to do that. She sat down next to him. "I came to say goodbye. There's something really important that I need to do, but it's going to be very dangerous."

"Do you have to?"

"Yes. I don't know how much you remember, but there are people out there who think you shouldn't be alive. They're called Freelancers. I've done my best to keep them at bay, but they won't listen to me much longer. I have to deal with them, for once and for all. It's the only way I can be sure you'll both be safe."

"I don't want you to go," Alec said. It wasn't fair. Not when he'd finally met someone who was the way they should be. 

She took his hand between both of hers. "There's no other way. I'm sorry, Alec. I know you'll be all right, though. They'll take care of you, the other me and the other you, and your mother, and even Julian. You won't be alone. Goodbye, Alec," she said, and stood up and disappeared.

He never saw her again.

  


* * *

  


* * *

  


In the year 2085, Alec contemplated the handful of people who had shown up for his twin's memorial service. He wasn't all that surprised by how few there were. The streets weren't safe for the Ageless these days.

Out of all the people in the room, the only one besides himself who knew Alan Sadler's true identity was Jason - his son from an alternate timeline who was older than he was and had never even been born in this timeline. To the rest of them, Alan had been Alec's eccentric twin, extremely sharp in many ways, but not the easiest person to deal with. Despite of all the advances in medical technology that Piron-SadTech had achieved, they had never been able to fully fix the damage done by that fateful bullet long ago. To the day he died, he had never been able to remember where exactly he had come from or why.

Alan and Jason had made a great team. It was a pity that Alan had refused the longevity treatments. Quite ironic, too, considering that his injury had been a major reason why they had been so invested in medical research, leading to the breakthrough that had changed the world. But Alan had said that he had no need to artificially prolong his troubled existence, and that had been the end of that conversation.

Alec had known this day would come. It had been strange watching himself age while remaining indefinitely pseudo-middle-aged himself. It was even stranger, after coexisting for so many years and, seeing so much together, to be the only Alec Sadler left in the timeline.


	3. 0.5"

As soon as reality had coalesced into its normal solid form around him, Alec realized that he'd been shot. It really hurt, but he couldn't just stay and wait for Escher's people to capture him. He pressed one hand against his bleeding forehead, grabbed the time travel device in his other hand, and rushed out of the antimatter lab.

He was starting to feel more than a little woozy, and some of the blood was getting into his eye. Head wounds tended to bleed a lot, right? That didn't necessarily mean it was serious.

Somehow, he managed to get out into the street without anyone stopping him. He wasn't entirely sure where he was going. The headache was growing worse, and by now there was blood dripping down his neck.

Just a little further, so they wouldn't find him, he really didn't want the device to end up in Escher's hands… Was his vision starting to fade or was that just the gore obscuring his sight?

A few passers-by had stopped to stare at him.

Next thing he knew, he was on his hands and knees, throwing up. This wasn't right, he had to save Emily! He tried to pull himself together and stand up again, but just thinking was getting more and more difficult, let alone coordinating his movements.

Someone was calling for an ambulance. That probably wasn't a bad idea right now.

  


* * *

  


It had been a very long day, but finally, Lucas was in custody, and Kiera had the rest of the pieces of the time travel device. She almost didn't dare to think about what it meant - she was holding the keys to going back home! She was on her way to hand them to Alec when her phone rang.

"Agent Cameron? It's Ann Sadler. I'm sorry if this is a bad time, but I just got the news and I thought that since you're his friend and you're with the police, maybe you could tell me more about what happened -"

"Slow down, Mrs. Sadler. What're you talking about?"

"Alec, of course! I though you knew. They just contacted me from the hospital."

"What? I'm sure there's been some kind of a misunderstanding. Please hold for two seconds."

Kiera took the cell phone from her ear, covered the microphone, and contacted him with her CMR. "Alec? Alec, are you there? Alec, is everything all right?"

She had to wait all of five seconds before he answered, "Yeah, yeah, of course I'm here, what's up?"

"You might want to listen in on this," she told him, and picked up her phone again. "Mrs. Sadler? He's all right, he's in his lab. What exactly did they tell you?"

"I don't understand," Alec's mother said, sounding confused. "They called me and said that he's in the hospital, that he's been shot. They had his wallet and his phone, that was how they knew to contact me in the first place. They described what he looks like and it sounded just like him. How's that possible if he's not actually there?"

"I'm sorry, I don't know the answer to that, but I'll go there and sort this out. Don't worry, he's fine, he really is. You can call him to check for yourself."

"All right, thank you. I'll do that."

"Okay, that was weird," Alec said as soon as Kiera had disconnected the call. "What do you think is going on?"

"I have no idea, but I'm going to find out."

Kiera's first guess was time travel, and when the doctor took her to see him, she knew she'd been right. If the unconscious young man in the hospital bed wasn't Alec, then he was using some camouflaging technique that was way beyond anything invented in this day and age. The latter explanation felt unlikely, though, especially since his belongings also matched Alec's. She scanned him, and saw nothing to suggest that it wasn't actually him.

"He was quite agitated and confused when they brought him in. The bullet only grazed his skull, but the impact was forceful enough to cause a cerebral contusion, which could lead to further complications," the doctor explained. "He wouldn't be unconscious otherwise, but we're going to keep him sedated until the morning, just to be safe. He was extremely lucky. An inch or two to the right and he'd be in the morgue instead of here."

"All right. Let me know when he wakes up, I want to ask him a few questions as soon as possible. Where, exactly, did they find him?"

"Kiera?" Alec said through the CMR link, sounding annoyed. "Kiera, the connection's glitching, the visual feed is a complete mess."

  


* * *

  


Alec had just been able to catch a glimpse of someone who looked exactly like him in the hospital when the connection started acting up. He'd never seen anything quite like it. It was as if another signal was coming through on the same frequency, but that shouldn't have been possible.

He heard someone enter the lab, looked up, and the explanation was instantly evident.

"Hello, Alec", Kiera said. Another Kiera. Two of him, two of her. Two signals from the exact same CMR messing up the system.

"What the hell is going on?" he asked her.

"I was going to ask you the same thing. You're the original Alec from this timeline, right?"

"As far as I know, yeah. And who does that make you?"

"The one that was sent to fix the mess your counterpart made."

"I don't think he's doing much of anything right now, he's in the hospital."

"Is he okay?"

"He probably wouldn't be there if he was, would he? Why is he even in this timeline? How did you do it? You used the device, didn't you? What was the power source?"

"Alec…" Kiera began hesitantly. "I guess there's no point in keeping the truth from you. In our timeline, Emily died. You traveled back to save her, and the entire timeline collapsed. The Freelancers sent me after you, to make sure that this timeline will stay on the right track."

"I - what? How does a timeline collapse, what does that even mean?"

Her answer didn't make much more sense than her initial explanation, but the details didn't really seem all that important to him, either. One sentence was stuck in his head as if it had been branded there in fiery letters.

Emily had died.

He couldn't let that happen in this timeline.

  


* * *

  


Emily had had an absolutely rotten day so far. She had to do something, get away from it all, from both Escher and Kellog - she couldn't care less about their power struggle, she just wanted to be free and to be sure that Alec was safe.

When she saw him in the lab, the haunted expression and the dark circles under his eyes, even more pronounced than after his usual long night spent working on one project or the other, she figured his day hadn't been any better than hers.

"What's going on? Has something happened?" she asked him.

He walked to her and grabbed her in a hug. "I'm so glad you're here. It's a long story, and you wouldn't believe half of it."

"Are you going to tell it to me?"

"Maybe later," he said, looking more troubled and desperate than she'd ever seen him. "Emily, let's go on a road trip. I'm fed up with everything here."

"What? Right now?" She was taken aback, not least because that was pretty much what she had been planning on suggesting.

"Well, after I've finished this and we've picked up our stuff. We could just hop on a bus and go wherever it takes us?"

"Yes! I think that's the best idea I've heard in days, I'd love to go! But Alec, this really isn't like you. Is everything all right?"

"No, not really. I'd be better off if we were somewhere else."

Did it really matter why he wanted to go? She'd probably learn the truth about it later. He had his secrets, but so did she, and hers were pretty major. Maybe somewhere else, somewhere away from all this, they could both be completely honest with each other.

She would've been ready to leave that second, but he still had some work to do - something about separating two overlapping signals, if she understood it correctly.

  


* * *

  


"They want to keep me here for at least another full day," Alec groaned to the second Kiera to visit him today - the one from his original timeline, the one who'd gone through all the same things that he had, and then some. Her description of the Freelancer prison and her escape from there had been really impressive.

"I'd listen to them if I were you. Don't even think about running away," Kiera said, sounding quite serious. "You look like death warmed over, you know, and you do actually have a brain injury, even if it's a minor one."

"Funny, the other Kiera just told me the same thing in almost the same words."

They both did have a point, too. He didn't exactly feel healthy - even with all the pain medication, he still had a vague headache, and he felt way more tired than he would have expected after the longest night's sleep he'd had in ages. Still, even if he knew she was right, he didn't like it one bit.

"I didn't come here to just lie in bed and watch things unfold exactly like they did in our timeline."

"You won't have to, I think we've already caused some major changes just by being here."

"How can you be sure? Today is…" he paused to sort his thoughts. What would happen today? He knew the date for yesterday so - oh no! "Kiera, it's today, she dies today! And before that, Travis attacks the lab and takes the suit. We have to do something!"

"Alec, you don't have do anything, okay? Just stay here, and get better. I'll handle this."

"Hurry, then! Go on!"

As soon as she had left, he followed suit. Standing up made him feel horribly dizzy, but it settled after a while.

This very day was why he'd traveled back in time in the first place. No way he was going to just wait it out and see what would happen.

  


* * *

  


Kiera was torn between what the Freelancers expected of her, that she should keep things the way they were supposed to be, and helping Alec, but in the end, the feeling that she had to do something won. Both she and the Freelancers had played their parts in Emily's death in the other timeline, after all.

She drove as fast as she could, rushed into the lab, and - she was too late.

Travis was already there, holding Emily by the neck. When Kiera ran in, he looked up, his eyes flashing.

"I told you not to call for help!" Travis yelled at Alec. "I told you what would happen if you did."

"No, no, no, no, I'll do it, I'll do everything you ask for, just don't -"

With a horrific, sickening crack, Travis snapped Emily's neck, and dropped her to the floor without even looking at her. "I keep my promises. You're next, Sadler."

Alec fell on his knees to grab hold of Emily's lifeless hand, tears in his eyes. "Go on and kill me, then, I don't care. Good luck finding someone else to reactivate your CMR."

The whole thing had happened too fast for Kiera to act, but now she had her gun trained on Travis. "Don't even think about it," she said, and fired.

Travis leaped aside, and ran towards her, firing back. When he got close enough, up the stairs, they went hand to hand. Even without a suit, his strength matched hers.

He managed to knock her down, and that brief pause in their struggle was enough for him to turn and point his gun at the lab below. He fired three shots in quick succession.

When she got up, he fled towards the door. He didn't have what he had come for anyway, so it didn't really matter. She was too shocked by what she saw to go after him.

She walked slowly down the stairs to get a closer look.

Alec and Emily were lying in a heap on the floor. Her lifeless eyes stared at the ceiling, his blood stained her face. Travis had fired at Alec three times: once in the head, twice in the chest. Kiera didn't need a scan to verify that he was just as dead as she was.

A clatter and a muffled sob from above made Kiera look up. Alec, the one from her timeline, still wearing hospital clothes, blood seeping through the bandage around his head, was sitting on top of the stairs, crying.

  


* * *

  


* * *

  


In the year 2056, Alec gazed out of the observation room, at the gleaming space ship filling the massive hangar. Building it had been an incredible feat with raw materials running so low, not to mention the constant sabotage attempts by competitors and the latest incarnation of Liber8, but they had pulled it off. Out of all the things he had helped create during his life, this was without doubt the most amazing, and the most beautiful. The first building blocks had been laid down long ago by his father – the antimatter technology had been originally developed by Piron, and although they had had their grudges, Alec had eventually inherited the company from him and merged it with SadTech.

Deep down, he felt disheartened that he couldn't join the mission himself, but he had to face the facts: he wasn't a young man anymore. Space travel was better left to those who had more years ahead of them, such as Jason, who had just turned thirty. It hadn't been an easy choice allowing his only son to participate, but Jason had been adamant about it, he was the most trustworthy person Alec could think of, and by any measure, he had been one of the best candidates.

They had put everything they had into this project. If it failed, SadTech would be done for, as would everyone else. The continuously escalating competition between the corporations, with the powerless governments failing to control it, had lead to a situation where they were so low on resources that the planet simply could not sustain them anymore. They had to solve this somehow, or the human race would not last another generation.

He had considered time travel, of course, but he did not find it an appealing option. He knew firsthand how uncontrollable it was. He had talked it through with both Kieras, and they had felt the same way.

It was better to look to the future than to the past.


	4. 0.0"

Alec felt the bullet graze his head during the time jump, but he was too amazed that he'd actually succeeded to pay much attention to it. It was only when he had buried the time travel device into a safe location that the adrenaline rush started to fade and he actually realized he was bleeding. It stung quite a bit. Still, it was hardly one of his biggest problems right now. So many things to do. He had to find Emily.

  


* * *

  


Kiera had always expected her last thoughts to be about her family. Instead, they turned out to be, "How the hell is Chen still alive?"

Then it was all over.

  


* * *

  


When Alec heard that Escher was dead, he couldn't help but wonder. He had told Kellog that Escher was their biggest problem, and now he was gone - had he pushed Kellog into arranging Escher's assassination? He had not expected that. Just like he had not expected that this timeline's Kiera would die. He felt responsible for both deaths.

He had had no idea that his actions could change things so drastically. How much more damage would he do? Really, running off to Thailand, removing himself from the equation, seemed like the best option he had.

  


* * *

  


Kiera thought that the time jump had made Alec more reckless than he'd been before it. She didn't really want to choose between the two, but she couldn't think of any other solution either. Catching him pointing a gun at the other, much calmer Alec from the current timeline made the decision easy.

Although she would not have wished the horrors of the Freelancer prison on her worst enemy, putting Alec there was still a notch better than killing him. He had made mistakes and bad decisions, but he definitely didn't deserve to die.

Later, when she went back to rescue him, she realized it was what she had been planning to do all along.

  


* * *

  


The vision of seeing his counterpart die with the time device slice buried in his neck, blood spurting out in a gory spectacle that would not have felt out of place in a Tarantino movie - that was going to haunt his dreams for the rest of his life. One more to add to the body count caused by his little leap back in time.

Would they all have been better off if he hadn't done it? At least Emily was still alive, so he had achieved his goal. The price had been high, though.

More than anything, he hoped that after this, there would be no more deaths. That they would just figure out some new status quo and life would go on, towards whatever future the current timeline would lead to.

Of course, he was never that lucky.

  


* * *

  


* * *

  


In the year 2039, Matthew Kellog watched Brad Tonkin walk away, towards his assignment in the past.

Even if everything went as planned, there was no way to know how things would turn out. The situation could end up being worse than it was right now. This timeline had worked out pretty well for him, after all. He practically ruled the world. Escher, Alec, Kiera, Theseus, the remains of Liber8, all those who had tried to slow him down, he had dealt with each one of them and come out on top. Still, as ambitious as he was, he would rather be a commoner in a prosperous realm than the king of its smoking ruins.

Sending Tonkin back was a desperate move - time travel was always a gamble.

Luckily, he had always enjoyed gambling.


End file.
